Remember Peter Molyneux’s game Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube? The game where players tap to chip away at a giant cube, revealing new layers and working their way toward the mystery of what’s at the center? The game where only a single player will see the result of everyone’s cube chipping? Well, that game has just received an interesting update.

The update includes new in-app purchase options to either chip away cubelets in quantities ranging from 10,000 ($0.99) to 500,000, ($10.99) or to add cubes in equal quantities. Essentially, the new element is that, for a price, you can hamper progress in uncovering what’s in the center of the cube. Prior to this, the only effect you could have on the cube was to remove cubelets.

Also, for those who want a look into the sociology of the game, the stats page now shows how many “RemoveCublets” and “AddCubelets” have been purchased. At the time of this writing, “RemoveCubelets” are winning out almost four to one.

Earlier this year, Peter Molyneux, the creator of the RPG series Fable, left Lionhead Studios and joined up with indie developer 22Cans. They’ve just released a free game on the App Store called “Curiosity – what’s inside the cube.” To risk understatement, we’ll say that it has an unusual premise. Because the game is so unconventional, a standard review doesn’t really make sense here. Instead, we’ll give our first impressions and urge you to play it for yourself.

When you start the game, you learn that “Something amazing is hidden at the centre of the cube. It will require the help of the whole world to chip away at its many layers… but only one person will find out what’s inside.”

A giant cube then appears on your screen, and you can turn it any which way, and zoom in to see that it’s made up of millions of tiny blocks. When you tap a block, it shatters, making a satisfying chime sound. Under the chipped-away block lies another layer of of blocks, but you can’t start chipping away at them until all blocks from the outer layer have been removed.

Sometimes you’ll destroy a block that contains a handful of gold coins. If you clear away a whole screen’s worth of blocks, you get a “clear screen” bonus. As is the nature of free-to-play games, there’s an in-game store that lets you buy things like firecrackers, bombs, and chisels that let you clear away blocks quicker. You can also pay 100 coins to look at a stats screen that shows things like how many players have signed in, how many “cubelets” you’ve cleared, etc.

Playing the game mostly requires a lot of tapping, but as you can see from the screenshot below, you can exercise your creative muscles as you clear away the blocks (our creative muscles are very weak).

As we played, it didn’t seem to show other people clearing away blocks in real time, but occasionally it would skip ahead and some blocks around us would disappear. That might have been a glitch in the matrix, or maybe it was the game trying to stay in sync with thousands of other players.

Even though there’s not much to it, Curiosity is relaxing to play. The music is very low key and Zen, and you can easily lose 10 or 15 minutes tapping mindlessly away. And who knows, maybe you’ll be the one to reach the center.

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The fine folks at Milkbag games have released Sidewords. A fun little diversion of a word game that is the devil child of crosswords and scrabble. For each level in the game the grid must be completed to win the level — this means that each letter at the top and side must be used. And not just the top or side, but each word must be made up of letters from the top and side to create a grid. It’s a pain, but in the right kind of way. Even the simplest of the levels can be a head scratcher until you get used to the game. Well worth the $3 as a diversion while we wait for Milkbag to finally release Snow Siege.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math.

It’s not always easy to tear your kids away from their tablets and make them do something edifying. Thankfully, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math relieves you of this task by turning mathematics into a fun touchscreen video game. Win win!

Aimed at children 3-6 years old, the app makes math fun by ‘gamifying’ it, turning simple mathematics problems into little challenges so that your pre-schooler can learn and play at the same time.

There are more than two dozen mini-games, split across three categories: Numbers, Shapes and Measurements, and Add and Subtract. According to the developer the difficulty of these puzzles is adaptive too, so kids of any ability can be both encouraged and challenged.

Mini Dayz has launched and it’s a pixelated 2.5D open world that’s as brutal as the desktop version. In this game, the player is dumped on shore with nothing. They must scavenge around for food, water, and weapons while avoiding attack. It’s the kind of game where the goal is to stay alive as long as possible. But that will never be very long. It’s oddly free and seems to only have an ad on the main screen — for now.

Pewter Games has brought their charming point and click adventure The Little Acre to iOS. It’s an amazingly beautiful animated adventure set in a sort of hybrid magical / alien world. A great all ages adventure and very fun.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, The House of Da Vinci by Blue Brain Games. There’s a reason Leonardo Da Vinci is the only renaissance figure who routinely shows up in video games you know. With his remarkable inventiveness and genius for creative problem-solving, Da Vinci was a gamer through and through. He was just born 500 hundred years too soon. Thankfully, there are studios like Blue Brain Games to bring him to life in videogame form. The House of Da Vinci, which comes to us courtesy of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, is a puzzler that seeks to channel the artistry and innovation of its title character.

You play as one of Da Vinci’s more promising apprentices, and you have the challenging task of trying to work out where the hell he’s gone. Was he assassinated by the church? Who knows. Has he quietly gone into a retirement? Perhaps. Did he accidentally invent a shrink ray and shrink himself down to the size of an dustmite? Probably not. Da Vinci’s workshop looks beautiful, thanks to some impressive 3D graphics, and the in-game environment is crammed with all the elaborate machines and crazy inventions you’d expect to find in the workplace of a renaissance genius.(more…)

Poly Bridge is out now on iOS, and it’s good to have it! It’s a great game and many seem to agree that it’s the best bridge builder game available. But the iOS versions, so far, is missing the sandbox mode. I would hope that it’s coming soon in an update. If you are all interested in physics puzzlers, grab this one. (Note: the video is for the PC version, I have yet to see a trailer for the mobile version, the developer Dry Cactus isn’t that great at marketing…)

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